Wind Turbine/Farm Simulations Using an Immersed Boundary Method

Abstract

Detached eddy simulations of wind turbine/farm are conducted, where the nacelle and tower are represented by the immersed boundary method (IBM), and the unsteady wind turbine blades are modelled by the actuator surface model (ASM). The solver (Park et al., 2020) provides significant advantages over the conventional body-fitted mesh approach in terms of the computational cost because the relative motion between the rotating and non-rotating components can be resolved without any mesh deformation. The IBM-ASM solver has been initially developed for rotorcraft aerodynamics simulations, and it has been comprehensively validated for several different helicopter configurations (Park et al., 2020). The aim of this research is to expand the area of applications to wind energy. The first validation case considered in this study is a single New MEXICO wind turbine in a uniform flow with two different yaw angles (0 and 30 degrees) at three different tip-speed ratios (Boorsma et al., 2018). Secondly, a single model wind turbine in an atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is studied using the concurrent inflow approach. Lastly, a wind farm composed of the 30 model wind turbines (Wu & Porte-Agel, 2013) is investigated.